The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected

by Lynn Emanuel

Overview

Winner of the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets
Emanuel’s version of a “new and selected poems” turns convention on its head. She ignores chronology, placing new poems beside old, mixing middle and early poems with recent work, and liberating all her poems from the restraints of their particular histories, both aesthetic and autobiographical. Whether writing in the comedic drag of the cartoon strip, or investigating the Mobius strip relationship between reader and writer, or exposing the humor and hurt that accompany visitations from Frank O’Hara and Gertrude Stein, The Nerve of It both stings and pleases with its intelligence, wit and vivacity. It breaks through, in ways that are bold, sexy, haunting and wry, the die-hard opposition of new and old, personal narrative and linguistic play, sincerity and irony, misery and hilarity. Open the book. Something new is happening here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822963691
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	08/21/2015
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Lynn Emanuel is the author of four previous books of poetry: Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then, Suddenly—, and, most recently, Noose and Hook.  Her work has been featured in ThePushcart Prize Anthology and TheBest American Poetry numerous times and is included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Series Award, the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets, and, most recently, a fellowship from the Ranieri Foundation.

Table of Contents

Note To the Reader xi

I

Out of Metropolis 3

Stone Soup 4

The Planet Krypton 5

The Sleeping 6

Of Your Father's Indiscretions and the Train to California 7

Lunch Break with Ted Berrigan and Neighbor's House on Fire 8

Drawing Rosie's Train Trip 9

Seizure 10

Frying Trout While Drunk 11

"Into the clearing of…" 12

She Is Six 13

When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore 14

Outside Room Six 15

Self-Portrait as Items in a Snowy Lithograph 16

Ordinary Objects 17

Big Black Car 19

II

The Garden 23

The Technology of Love 24

Heartsick 26

Blonde Bombshell 28

The White Dress 29

Self-Portrait at Eighteen 30

Portrait of the Author 31

The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am a Poet 33

III

Self-Portrait 39

Dressing the Parts 40

Starlet in Satin Dressing Gown 43

Homage to Sharon Stone 44

On Waking after Dreaming of Raoul 46

Inspiration 48

Spite-Homage to Sylvia Plath 49

Walt, I Salute You! 50

The Occupation 52

"Hello, Mallarmé," 53

In English in a Poem 55

A Poem Like an Automobile Can Take You Anywhere 56

The Past 58

Inside gertrude stein 60

IV.

My Life 65

Kiss 66

Grieving Was 67

Dying Was 68

"I tried to flatter myself into extinction,…" 69

"While my mother lies in a hospital bed…" 70

Ars Poetica 71

Halfway Through the Book I'm Writing 72

The Burial 74

These Days 76

Talking with Frank O'Hara 78

Metamorphosis 80

Stray Dogg 81

Dogg Howse 82

Hang Dogg 83

Who Iz Dogg? 85

Dead Dogg 86

The Angels of the Resurrection 89

The Dig 90

The Murder Writer 91

Dead Girl's Bedroom 93

Soliloquy of the Depressed Book 94

"April 18, the 21st Century" 95

Homage to Dickinson 97

Like God 98

Then, Suddenly- 100

Acknowledgments 103

Editorial Reviews

07/20/2015
Emanuel’s work (Noose and Hook), in the new and previously collected poems presented here in an original sequence, displays all the qualities of an outgoing personality: direct, confident, vivacious, and generous to the reader. It’s an original turn; the arc is nonchronological and reads as a single, independent text that makes clear the central concerns in her work and shows the development of various aesthetic and thematic tracks. The collection begins with Emanuel’s most straightforwardly autobiographical poems and moves through her increasing interest in the slippery qualities of narrative. Poems of portraiture and place begin to include meditations on mortality and decay, attend to abstracted qualities of identity and intimacy, in homages to Baudelaire, O’Hara, Stein, Whitman, and Berrigan. While in much of her writing the writer is “like a ship plated with the armor of experience,/ nosing the seas which are its seas,” there is also “the call to rise out of the trance of myself/ into the surcease of the dying world.” Emanuel’s uninhibited manner and her noir sensibilities are constants, especially the finely wrought use of melodrama and the erotic. New readers will gain a strong sense of Emanuel’s poetics, and those familiar with her work will see old poems in a new light as their shifted contexts draw out new resonances. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Emanuel's work (Noose and Hook), in the new and previously collected poems presented here in an original sequence, displays all the qualities of an outgoing personality: direct, confident, vivacious, and generous to the reader. It's an original turn; the arc is nonchronological and reads as a single, independent text that makes clear the central concerns in her work and shows the development of various aesthetic and thematic tracks. The collection begins with Emanuel's most straightforwardly autobiographical poems and moves through her increasing interest in the slippery qualities of narrative. Poems of portraiture and place begin to include meditations on mortality and decay, attend to abstracted qualities of identity and intimacy, in homages to Baudelaire, O'Hara, Stein, Whitman, and Berrigan. While in much of her writing the writer is "like a ship plated with the armor of experience,/ nosing the seas which are its seas," there is also "the call to rise out of the trance of myself/ into the surcease of the dying world." Emanuel's uninhibited manner and her noir sensibilities are constants, especially the finely wrought use of melodrama and the erotic. New readers will gain a strong sense of Emanuel's poetics, and those familiar with her work will see old poems in a new light as their shifted contexts draw out new resonances.”
—Publishers Weekly


“Emanuel’s extraordinary poetic intelligence, gutsy wit, and her images’ ideal meld of the concrete and the ineffable amaze. What vibrant, resonant, nimble poems, each a perfect cocktail of acuity, objectivity, and heart.”
—Amy Gerstler


“Lynn Emanuel’s riveting volume is ordered as the story of a life, but the emphasis belongs on story; this poet is possessed by the inescapable elision, invention, and revision that telling entails. Her riddling, elusive poems pull the reader through memory mirrored and revealed, told by a narrator who slips in and out of her own skin, delivering, time after time, the truth of ardor, sorrow, and bewilderment in poems that pulse with sheer wild nerve.”
—Mark Doty


“Already one of our most original voices, Emanuel has constructed a ‘new and selected’ that is both stunning and seamless. Excavating the previous work to reveal the emotional and aesthetic ‘nerve’ of it, Emanuel invites us to watch a mature and provocative artist emerge from the verve and dazzle that have always characterized her work.”
—Martha Collins


“Every poem in The Nerve of It takes on a different tumult—from madcap to turbulent. The collection is vivid, sexy, and captures Emanuel’s irrepressible drive.”
—Kimiko Hahn

From the Publisher

11/15/2015
Award-winning poet Emanuel's new collection is not exactly a "New and Selected." Instead, she's disassembled her four previous books, then reassembled them to create a whole new flow. It makes sense, because Emanuel is a storyteller, a scene creator, even a scene stealer in her energetic, let's-spill-it-out style. She puts you right there: "Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station,/ and the scenery begins to creep forward." And she puts herself into it: "Wherever there was a street going indifferently about her business,/ I was the dog." Elsewhere, revealing a keen and worldly eye, she wonders of a white dress, "What does it feel like to be this shroud/ on a hanger, this storm cloud." VERDICT Propulsive reading; great even if you have her other works.

Library Journal